Book review — Modern DevOps Practices — Second Edition: Implement, secure, and manage applications on the public cloud by leveraging cutting-edge tool

Modern DevOps Practices — Second Edition Author — Gaurav Agarwal

Publisher — Packt

Page count — 568 total page count in a PDF First published —First Edition September 2021, Second Edition January 2024

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this publication for review purposes. Views presented in this review are subjective. I review the book “as is” — I focus on what I see, read, touch, etc. Photos published here are under the “for review” purposes.

Preview of the First chapter is available on Packt website: https://www.packtpub.com/product/modern-devops-practices-second-edition/9781805121824

Some backstory — Given that I teach people in DevOps Institute courses I like to read about various DevOps related practices, both process & technology wise.

This book has been recommended to me by one person from Packt. I’ve decided to take a look, why not.

Overview

This publication is a rather massive one, reaching up to 568 pages in total (PDF). I have not got the printed copy so I’m describing the electronic one.

I’ve said that “ I think that’s a good idea to keep a publication short, as it can be time consuming to read longer publications of 500 pages.” when I reviewed 50 Kubernetes Concepts Every Engineer Should Know yet in this case this publication is more like a manual that you consult when you need some additional knowledge.

I have not read this book cover to cover, I’ve read particular parts that do interested me.

The publication is divided into five parts, a short appendinx and an index:

Part 1 — Modern DevOps Fundamentals

Part 2 — Container Orchestration and Serverless

Part 3 — Managing Config and Infrastructure

Part 4 — Delivering Applications with GitOps

Part 5 — Operating Applications in Production

Appendix — The Role of AI in DevOps

Part 1 covers fundamentals of DevOps — a short history, background on cloud computing, containers, Git, GitOps and Docker.

Part 2 is mostly about Kubernetes and Containers as a Service (CaaS). It covers some examples with Amazon ECS with EC2 and Fargate.

Part 3 talks about Infrastructure as Code, Terraform, configuration management with Ansible and immutable infrastructure with Packer.

Part 4 focuses on GitOps, continuous integration with GitHub and Jenkins, Continuous Deployment/Delivery with Argo CD and has a chaper on securing and testing your CI/CD pipelines.

Part 5 looks at operating applications in production from various points of view — KPIs, SLI/SLA/SLO, error budgets, disaster recovery, RTO, RPO, traffic management, security and observability with Istio.

Finally there’s this short appendix (8 pages) about the role of AI in DevOps.

It’s a hefty publication, no doubt about that.

My opinion

This is a very solid publication for people who would like to learn how to implement DevOps in their own environments. This publication is suitable to both aspiring as well as expert engineers, both groups can find some useful knowledge in it.

Given a rather broad range of topics covered I’d say that it’s definitely a good technical manual on how to implement DevOps. The author covers the basics in the first chapter, then dives straight on towards practical application of various DevOps concepts.

If you’re an educator like myself then I’d say consider at least viewing the full copy on the Packt website, you can use a trial period for that.

Physical vs Digital copy

I’ve only viewed the digital copy thus I have no idea on the quality/usability of the printed copy.

Minor gripes

None in this case. A digital copy has been created in a useful way, you can ctrl+f find whatever you need.

Summary & Closing thoughts

This review is rather short compared to my other ones due to the sheer volume of information contained within this publication.

Basically, I’d say it’s not a book that you read cover to cover. You use this type of publication according to your needs — if you for example know a lot about Docker then you can just skim-read that particular chapter to search for some concepts, no need to read it in full in such a case.

There’s a good example of how to use the concepts presented in this publication based on the Blog App exercise — it’s a thorough case where the author presents concepts described in the book in a practical format.

Overall — as the title suggests, it’s a publication about Modern DevOps Practices. If you resonate with concepts presented in this book then go for it, you’ll learn a lot.

Thanks for reading and untill next one,

MJ